Turning Two Voices into a Dozen

Nicole originally only sang two verses and two choruses, so I wrote a bridge to extend the song. Since she wasn't available to sing it, I tried to sing from the point of the guy who just left her. If he "walked away with a smile", as she sings, I simply tried to figure out what's behind the smile. I think I may have used the Antares Auto-Tune a little to touch up the intonation on my voice.

Did you notice that "whooo!" just after my voice comes in, and that sustain flute note dies away? A few months ago, Nicole did some scat singing for me, and I had a track full of hummed melodies, improvs and "whooos!" to chose from. In order to connect the bridge with the rest of the song, I played a long sustained note on the flute sample, and then pasted in a "whooo!" from Nicole. The idea was to recreate some of the studio chatter you can hear in the Stones' "Gimme Shelter" and the Beatles' "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", when a particularly impressive part was sung.

You'll notice the huskier black-sounding voice that's "dueting" with Nicole on the chorus. TC-Helicon had graciously let me borrow one of their VoiceOne vocal processors for a magazine article, so I simply ran Nicole's voice ran through their "VoiceModel Older" patch on a separate track, and dropped those lines into the choruses. I'd like to think that someone listening to this song who hasn't read these "liner notes" would be able to figure out that it's not a separate singer. Finally, just to really flesh things out, in addition to the "three" different singers on the track (Nicole, myself, and Nicole's VoiceOne-created doppelganger), I also played a chorus of sampled vocals via Reason in the last couple of choruses, as well.

Finally, when the entire track's instrumentation was complete, I brought Nicole back in to rerecord her vocals. We made four passes at the them, and then "comped" them into one really exceptional sounding vocal track.

As I said, this song is a pretty fair example of how far home recording has come in the last twenty years. It's got everything and the kitchen sink in it--but I'd like to think it all works pretty well.